


Baby Come Home

by xianvar



Series: June Special: Bingo [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Happy Ending, Limbo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 23:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11218695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xianvar/pseuds/xianvar
Summary: There is a message in a bottle.Curious despite himself, Arthur leans down, fishes it out. There is something inside the bottle, a—a rolled up sheaf of paper? His hands are steady as he unplugs the bottle, because why shouldn’t they be?





	Baby Come Home

**Author's Note:**

> The first fill for my [FFC Bingo Card](http://kephiso.dreamwidth.org/6765.html#cutid1)! :D  
> Written for the prompt _message in a bottle_.  
>  Unbeta'd so if you notice anything amiss, let me know :)
> 
> Title from _Jet Pack Blues_ by _Fall Out Boy_.

Something hits his leg, but when he looks down, the water is too murky to actually see what it is. Arthur fights the urge to yank his feet back, to try to get away from whatever there is under the surface, but then it bumps into his leg again and bops above the surface for a moment and— _oh_.

It’s a bottle.

Curious despite himself, Arthur leans down, fishes it out. There is something inside the bottle, a—a rolled up sheaf of paper? His hands are steady as he unplugs the bottle, because why shouldn’t they be?

 _Come home_ , the message reads, the writing faintly familiar but not enough to actually ping anything in Arthur’s memory. Possibly an old class mate with a similar hand; if it was somebody more important, he would surely recognize the hand. But he doesn’t, and that’s just another hint that the message can’t be for him. Also, he is at home here, where else would he go?

He wades back out of the shallow body of water, suddenly unsure of what he had been doing in there. What had he been doing?

It doesn’t matter, he supposes. He still has the bottle in his hand, the paper of the message crinkling under his finger. Why is he still holding on to them? It’s not talking to him, so, why keep it?

He opens his hand, feels the bottle give in to gravity. He doesn’t stay long enough to see it hit the ground. He fixes his gaze on the horizon and walks.

~*~

The sky is clear above him, his surroundings deathly quiet. It feels like a dream, like he should be chasing half-forgotten faces and never reach them. He cannot remember the last time he dreamed; he can’t remember the last time he slept, though he must have. Surely he must be sleeping. Nobody can survive without sleep, and aside from feeling lonely, he is not crazy.

Or maybe he _is_ crazy and simply doesn’t know it, he muses; how would he know without anybody else present? But he does not feel crazy.

“I’m not crazy,” he says, and his voice, too, sounds normal enough to his ears. It is almost loud enough to drown out the slight _clink_ from somewhere on his left, though only just. There is another _clink_ , glass hitting metal, the sound unnaturally loud. Another _clink_ , this time accompanied by what might be waves lapping against the sides of a small canal. He hadn’t been aware of a canal next to him.

Maybe he _is_ losing his mind. Or maybe he had just been too far away in his own thoughts. It happens. It’s been happening for a while. For as long as he can remember, now that he thinks about it. That makes it normal, right?

Another _clink_ pulls him back out of his thoughts. He finally turns to look to where the sound is coming from. Nothing is visible, but then, neither is the surface of the water. He takes a step towards it.

There is another bottle in the canal, softly hitting the sides with barely perceptible waves.

Arthur stares at it for a long moment. It stirs a memory within him, long forgotten, flimsy. There is glass in his hand, the thin stem of a wine glass, the clacking sound of—something, maybe chess pieces?—being moved, the sour-bitter-sweet taste of cheap wine in his mouth.

He blinks. His hands are empty and everything is quiet, his mouth parched from going too long without drink.

He squats down, bops the top of the bottle. It goes under, reappearing a mere moment later with another soft _clink_ against the side of the canal. He picks it up.

 _Come home, darling,_ the note reads, in the same hand as the previous one. It is messy and uneven and sad, and Arthur gives an equally sad smile. Whoever is sending these messages must be desperate. He hopes the sender will find their darling soon, because surely, the darling must be just as lonely as he is.

He puts the message back into the bottle and drops it into the canal, hears it bump into the side again as he turns to move away. He hopes the message will reach the intended recipient. The sender sounds like they miss them.

~*~

The next bottle appears out of the blue.

As in, it literally falls out of the clear blue sky, just moments before it starts raining so hard Arthur is almost worried the bottle will be carried away.

It’s a children’s bottle this time, pink with blue elephants on it. It seems weirdly incongruous, and even though he is fairly sure this one is not for him either, he finds himself picking it up and unscrewing the top.

 _Remember that it’s a dream, darling,_ the message reads in the now familiar scrawl. _Wake up and come home. It’s time for you to come back_.

Arthur smiles, and the smile hurts like a shard of glass. The paper crinkles in his hand, and when he looks again, both it and the bottle are nowhere to be seen. He does not think about how he can’t remember the last time he slept.

~*~

Time crawls along steadily. Arthur wanders the beach, decrepit and crumbling buildings barely visible in the far distance. There is a gaping hole where his heart is supposed to be, a feeling of drowning and suffocation. His chest is intact and dry when he touches it, just to be sure.

The quiet is thunderous, kicking at his brain until all he wants to do is curl up. There is a restless energy just underneath the surface of his skin that propels him forward, though, and at least as long as he keeps moving, his thoughts only bruise instead of slice.

He sort of expects another message, another bottle but—nothing. There is nothing but the wide beach, tightly packed sand underneath his feet, the shore so close and yet far enough away that he cannot hear the waves lap at the beach.

An eternity later that might as well have been nothing more than a blink, something changes. For a moment, he isn’t sure what it is that makes him stop short. But—yes, something is out of the ordinary here.

The something turns out to be an apparition, a vague blob in the far distance, too far to make anything out properly. If Arthur squints, the shape looks almost human like. His mouth twists into a grimace without conscious input, despite the fact that nobody is there to witness the expression.

And that is the key point: there is nobody here. And he hates that, but not enough to trust his traitorous mind that someone else should have found their way into these wastelands.

He turns and leaves without a backwards glance.

~*~

“Darling!”

Arthur stares at the pebbles at his feet. They are round and smooth, each the same as the other.

 _Exactly the same_ , he realizes after a moment, and redoubles his effort to stare the pebbles into submission. He kneels down, takes two of them into his hand, and they indeed to not feel any different. _How curious_ , he thinks and stands again, still one pebble in each hand.

“Darling!”

He looks at his feet, bare and sandy, his hands still visible on the edge of his vision. He concentrates as hard as he can, counts down, opens both hands at exactly the same time, exactly the same angle. The pebbles tumble out, spinning and rotating in exactly the same way. Arthur chuckles.

“Darling!”

It sounds like somebody—somebody who is not Arthur—calling, but he is alone here. He knows this. He will not believe any lies his mind seems intent on feeding him. He keeps on not-hearing the voice, instead trying to look for a pebble that is different than the others.

 _They look a lot like copy and paste_ , Arthur thinks, and then finds himself wondering what exactly _copy and paste_ means. He doesn’t know, and he thinks he might feel disturbed by that lack of knowledge, except the emotion is muffled, as though he is only _supposed_ to feel that way, but doesn’t really. He shrugs in his mind, the disquiet sliding out of his mind.

It’s distracting enough that he doesn’t hear the steps behind him until it is too late.

“Darling,” the voice repeats, weary and tired. Arthur wants to turn around and tell him that he is not his _darling_ , but it seems like a steep slide if he starts talking to the apparition. He wishes he could just turn away and the apparition would cease to be as had been the case with the messages, but he is already turned away, and it has not made the apparition disappear.

A strong hand grips his elbow, and Arthur startles, a full-body twitch that is almost-but-not-quite enough to dislodge the touch. He stares at it, wide-eyed. He _is_ losing his mind.

“Darling—Arthur, please.” The voice is full of anguish, desperation, pleading, and Arthur feels an inexplicable sense of guilt. But whatever the apparition’s problem is, it is not Arthur’s fault. It can’t be his fault; he’s never done anything other than be here, and up until the apparition, he’s been here alone.

Maybe, if he ignores the apparition, it will vanish on its own. This approach, too, affords him a reprieve of deciding what to do with it if it doesn’t disappear.

The hand on his elbow pulls gently, not even getting harsher when Arthur resists and keeps staring at the pebbles at his feet.

“Hey,” the voice says, still so impossibly gentle it makes the gaping wound in Arthur’s chest contract. He wishes the apparition were real, were actually talking to _him_ as he is. The _need_ to have someone want him, _need him_ like the apparition misses its darling is visceral and almost overwhelming.

The hand on his elbow shifts, never letting him go. He doesn’t struggle. He can hear the apparition move, can see a blurred blob of some pastel out of the corner of his eye. Before he can get a good look at the apparition, he drops his head and squeezes his eyes shut.

 _It’s not real_ , he tells himself, trying to give himself the mental equivalent of a slap. _You are alone here, don’t even pretend otherwise_.

“Oh, darling,” the voice says, suddenly full of regret. Arthur shakes his head, raises his hands to cover his ears. It doesn’t matter if he is behaving childishly; he’s kept his sanity so far and he’s not about to lose it now!

His undoing is the apparition pulling him into its arms. He doesn’t want to go, tries to resist, but he has been alone for a long long time and his body is more touch-starved than he had anticipated. He melts into the apparition’s chest, vaguely surprised that he doesn’t simply fall through it.

A hand strokes up and down his back, the other gently scratching at the nape of his neck. It’s only then that he realizes the hand on his elbow is gone, and even though the apparition’s arms are loose around him, it’s more effective than actually holding on to him.

“’m not your darling,” Arthur mumbles, and then inhales a mouthful of the apparition’s scent. It connects with something at the very back of his mind, buried underneath boulders of broken down memories, and no matter how hard he strains, he cannot unearth it.

The apparition chuckles.

“’m not the one you’re looking for. ‘m sure your darling is missing you.” He tries to convince himself he wants to pull away, but the apparition wraps its arms around him properly, hugging him. “Y’need to go get y’darlin’,” Arthur slurs, trying to convince the apparition to let him go. It will already be hard to go back to being alone, but the longer he stays in its arms, the harder it will be. He can feel it in his bones, in the aching of his chest. His heart feels raw as it fights valiantly against its cage.

The apparition chuckles again. “But I have him already.”

And when he presses something that feels a lot like a close-mouthed kiss against Arthur’s temple, Arthur can feel himself giving up. Surely it won’t hurt too much to just—just rest a moment?

~*~

“I’d like you to come home with me, Arthur,” the apparition tells him. Or maybe it actually is an actual person. Arthur entertains that thought for a moment, and even though he knows how much it will hurt when the apparition inevitably reveals itself as what it is, the temptation of thinking, just for a little while, that he is not alone—he simply prays that the truth will not shatter him, later.

“I’m at home here,” he says, and finally looks at the man. He seems—not really familiar, but a little like seeing someone on the street and _thinking_ you recognize them until you realize that no, there is nothing but superficial likeness to someone you know.

Arthur doesn’t know anyone except himself, and yet this is what it feels like.

The man smiles, a sad, pained smile.

“Oh, darling.” He has a far-away look in his eyes. Arthur wants to tell him again that he is not his darling, that his darling is likely waiting for him someplace else, but he has done this, and—it’s not so bad to just—just pretend for a while that he is the man’s darling, isn’t it?

The man clears his throat. “I know you probably don’t believe me, but this is not your home.”

Arthur bristles, but what more than _this **is** my home_ can he say? So he doesn’t say anything, keeps staring at the man as he comes closer again.

“Do you trust me?” he asks, and Arthur doesn’t, _shouldn’t_ , but somehow he does, inexplicably. He nods. The man smiles, an empty expression that doesn’t reach his eyes. His eyes, so filled with anguish and desperation that Arthur knows with startling clarity that this is the sender, the one looking for his darling. He feels pity all of a sudden, wants to say something—anything, really, but the man has already turned away.

“Then come with me,” he says, and it takes Arthur a breath to realize that the man is talking to him. “I will take you home. Just—just come along.”

 _I am at home here_ , Arthur wants to say, but his curiosity wins out and so he follows the man.

He doesn’t look back at the beach, even though it feels, strangely, like a goodbye.

~*~

Arthur comes to suddenly, gasping and unable to keep the shivers from wrecking his whole body. There is a needle in his arm, the skin around red and slowly turning dark, a bruise in the making. For a moment, he is entirely distracted by it, until a hand moves into his field of vision, sliding the needle out. He exhales audibly, not quite pain, but also no relief.

“Darling,” a voice says, familiar and gentle and definitely stirring memories in Arthur’s mind, and his eyes snap up.

There is Eames, in his terrible, amazing clothes, staring at him with eyes that see too much, that connect too much, and Arthur has never seen anything better in his life.

“Eames—” His voice breaks, but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t even trust his legs to carry him right now. He feels shaky, _shaken_ to the bone, and it probably shows. A heartbeat later, Eames is by his side, pulling him into his arms, and he is _real_ ; Arthur can feel and smell and hear him, and he doesn’t think he ever wants to let him go.

“Darling,” Eames says again, and Arthur recalls something he thought eons ago and can’t help but smile. Eames missed him. Eames risked everything to save him, even his own sanity, and really, how can he ever let Eames go again?

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you feel like it, come say hi at my [DW](https://kephiso.dreamwidth.org). I promise I don't bite! :D


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